Empowering girls to break into STEM
Role
Co-Lead UI/UX Designer
Team
2 Designers
2 Developers
Tools
Figma
React Native
JavaScript
Duration
3 Hours (initially)
I joined my first hackathon with 3 other Systems Design Engineering students! At the University of Waterloo Women in Engineering Hackathon, we were given the challenge prompt:
It was only a single day and filled with workshops, so we ended up only having about 3 hours to put together our final solution. The hard work was worth it in the end, as we won 2nd place at the hackathon and were inspired by the encouraging feedback from other delegates and judges to continue working on the idea and we are continuing to develop it.
<aside> ⏱️ Time We only had 3 hours to come up with a solution and prototype it to present to the judges. We could not code or include all the features.
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<aside> 📕 Lack of Experience Half of the team was new to Figma and prototyping on there was the only option since there was no time to code.
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That being said, we tried to combat these challenges by dividing and conquering (plus some planning of course 😉). We made sure to come prepared with an idea before arriving. We also delegated roles before beginning any work so that we could complete work and collaborate efficiently. On our Notion page for the day, we created a
task list and a timeline for everything that needed to be completed throughout the day. Additionally, where there were gaps in knowledge we spent time discussing and teaching each other some basics so that we would be able to move forward. This allowed us to split up and work on different parts of the solution.
To narrow down our problem space, we tried to explore different how-might-we’s, and came up with the following to focus on: